Are you missing Virtual Machine relationships with BMC Discovery?

Are you missing Virtual Machine relationships with BMC Discovery?

Having recently been involved in a data quality assessment and remediation project one of the most common issues we came across was that of being able to link Virtual Machines to underlying Infrastructure and connected devices.

Our approach on the project started with looking at the discovery runs to see if there were any notable ECA errors and then to look at the Discovery Platform scripts and TPL patterns to understand how BMC Discovery was expecting to query and understand these relationships.

When looking through the patterns the most common, and in
some cases only, method used to link CI’s to the Virtual Machine is to use the
UUID of the Virtual Machine. For example within the VirtualDevice to VM Linkage
pattern you find:

This was particularly true for being able to link Virtual Machine Disks to the underlying storage and in analysing the data collected by BMC Discovery we found that in a lot of cases the UUID was not being returned. Rather than being an issue with BMC Discovery or the patterns this is down to a setting within VMware itself. The disk.EnabledUUID=True was missing from the configuration meaning that the UUID of the VMDK was not being passed through.

In order for the VMDK UUID to be passed through to Windows the advanced configuration disk.EnableUUID=”TRUE” needed adding to the VMX file via the vCenter. This was achieved using the following steps.